The Vampire (1957)

Original title: El Vampiro

Called back home to the Sycamores, the country estate where she grew up, to help care for her sick aunt María Teresa, young Marta (Ariadna Welter) steps into a more sinister situation then caregiving. It’s never a good sign when the local villagers don’t dare go out at night, and when the only vehicle willing to take one home is a cart carrying imported Eastern European soil.

On the plus side, Marta meets strapping, stupid and cowardly Enrique (Abel Salazar) just after she steps off the train carrying her to Gothic Mexico, and he is her contractually mandated romantic lead (as well as the obligatory odious comic relief), so there’s that. In fact, we will later learn that Enrique has already been involved in the business of Marta’s family before they meet, for he is secretly a doctor of medicine, called in by Marta’s uncle Emilio (José Luis Jiménez).

Once Marta and Enrique arrive at the Sycamores, they learn María Teresa died two days ago and has already been buried. Marta’s other aunt Eloísa (Carmen Montejo) has changed a bit since our heroine last saw her. She looks rather young for an old lady and has gotten into the habit of glaring sinisterly. Of course she’s wearing a cape now. The servants and uncle Emilio are clearly disturbed by more than María Teresa’s death, something that may very well have to do with their new neighbour, Count Duval (Germán Robles), a cape-wearing gentleman we the audience have already witnessed sucking the blood of a child. Duval has plans for the estate, the family, and Marta, many of them involving further bloodsucking, both literally and metaphorically. Worse still, Marta slips into gothic heroine mode rather quickly and become utterly useless, so all that stands between her and vampirism is Dr. Enrique.

El Vampiro is the movie that really put gothic horror as a mainstay on the map of Mexican cinema, seeing as it combined a smidgen of the modern age, Mexican cultural concepts concerning the supernatural, much of Universal horror with even more expressionist shadows and made a box office hit out of it. The country’s cinema would take a couple of decades of eventually pretty threadbare productions to cure itself of the macabre on screen for a while, but before that, it was one of the great countries of gothic horror together with Italy and Great Britain (one might argue Japan’s kaidan movies belong here as well, and glance longingly at Corman’s Poe cycle).

While not a perfect film, Fernando Méndez’s vampire movie hits so many of the pleasure points of gothic horror it is difficult not to swoon as often as Marta does. The whole mood of the film is lovely, how everything is drenched in shadows, every inch of screen estate looks and feels decrepit and decaying (art director Gunther Gerszo’s work is breath-taking), and even the silliest rubber bat with the most visible strings can’t change that.

Of course, silly rubber bats are a gothic mainstay as well, as are madwomen (Alicia Montoya) hidden away somewhere, premature burials, poison rings, superstitious villagers, smug vampires and their hatred of consense in relationships, cobwebs so thick, they might catch a bat, dramatic climaxes in burning rooms and so on, and so forth. Whatever you might wish for in this kind of production, Méndez and co. have probably found a place for it, and most certainly one that makes it look incredibly good.

Along the way, the film does things differently from time to time: romantic lead and comic relief are typically not united in the same character, nor does the romantic lead usually come over as quite as much as an idiot as Enrique does. This isn’t the only mix of two usually distinct character types in one role here: eventually, the film’s hidden madwoman character will also turn out to be its Van Helsing, and frankly, the actual hero of the piece. Which is a very satisfying development.

As satisfying as is all of El Vampiro – it’s no surprise that it made a lot of money and awoke the gothic instincts of Mexican cinema again.

The Man and the Monster (1959)

Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

Famous pianist Samuel Magno (Enrique Rambal) has retreated from the limelight for mysterious reasons, hiding away in a hacienda on the outskirts of a small Mexican village. He’s ready for some sort of comeback, though. He has arranged the big public reveal of his protégé Laura (Martha Roth), whom he believes to be the Greatest Pianist in the World (piano fans around the world are keeping records and score tables of piano duels, I assume).

Because of this coming attraction, surprisingly two-fisted music critic Ricardo Souto (Abel Salazar) comes to town for an unarranged interview. Magno, living alone with his severe and rather creepy, cat-carrying, mother (Ofelia Guilmáin) and Laura, is very reticent about any attempts of Ricardo’s to speak with him, but Laura is rather smitten by Ricardo (he is played by the writer/producer, after all).

Ricardo for his part stumbles upon Magno’s secret. It concerns the corpse of the former Greatest Pianist in the World (also Martha Roth) locked into a side-chamber, a pact with the devil, and the fact that Magno turns into a furry-faced fiend whenever he plays the piano (because the devil has a weird sense of humour).

As regular readers know, I just love Mexican horror cinema of this era. The Man and the Monster, directed by the often genuinely brilliant Rafael Baledón, is no exception to that rule.

As usual, I find myself particularly delighted by the film’s mixture of genres and tones. At its core, this is of course a contemporized gothic horror version of the Faustian pact (with shades of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, if you want to see it that way, and I certainly enjoy doing that, if only to annoy the squares), but it is also a vigorously played melodrama, as well as the kind of monster movie that includes a wild fist fight between a music journalist and a furry fiend the journalist actually wins.

As is so often the case in his movies, Baledón is a master of drenching rooms into long and deep shadows, of having his characters throw meaningful, heavy glances at the slightest provocation – though provocations here are generally not slight – and of treating the silliest, slightest moments of the script with a heaviness of emotion and expression that to me often seems at the core of what makes Gothic cinema so impressive and expressive.

Baledón is particularly honest about where the visual style of his gothic horror is actually coming from – the nods to Universal cinema and the shadows of a – typically not gothic as we non-academics understand the term – Val Lewton production are there and accounted for (lovely as ever), but there’s also that brilliant, minimalist scene in which Magno flashes back to his pact, emoting in front of a set that’s all classical movie expressionism and could be taken directly from Caligari.

On a subtextual level, this is a film curiously fitting to our times in some regards, seeing as it concerns a man of influence and power first taking control of the life of a young woman to then be able to destroy it for his own convenience. Of course, she is also saved by her two-fisted music critic instead of doing any of her saving  herself, which would not play well in a contemporary movie, but this is still a film made in 1959. And a rather wonderful one at that.

The Brainiac (1962)

Original title: El barón del terror

1661. The Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar) is sentenced to death by the Mexican Inquisition, for crimes as varied as witchcraft, necromancy, seduction of married women and virgins and, ahem, dogmatism. Because the Inquisition is one to talk. The Baron’s ability to withstand torture while smiling mockingly doesn’t help his case, either. One Marcos Miranda (Rubén Rojo) comes forward to speak about the Baron’s character as a scientist (that one always goes over well with any inquisition) and a great guy, but all he’ll have to show for it are two hundred lashes and a still sentenced to death baron.

As is tradition, on the night of his burning, the Baron curses the judges who sentenced him, promising them that three hundred years hence, when the comet that just happens to appear in the skies right now returns, he too will come back and revenge himself on their descendants.

Mexico, three hundred years hence. The Baron does indeed return with the comet, though he has changed a bit. Now, he regularly transforms into an inexplicably bizarre and shoddy monster suit with a prehensile tongue to suck the brains of descendants and pretty women alike. The seduction part of his sentencing was apparently bang on, though his technique for seduction consists of staring creepily while an off-camera light blinks at his face. (“I feel scared when you stare at me like that. I want you to keep staring at me” are actual lines in the movie).

Given the baron’s predilections, is it any wonder he develops the monster hots for a female descendant of one of his judges? A woman who just happens to be the girlfriend of one Reynaldo Miranda (also Rubén Rojo, of course). Also involved are two terrible cops, but the less said about them, the better.

On a good day, Chano Urueta was able to make a movie like the brilliant The Witch’s Mirror; in an off-week, he made things like this bizarre gothic-influenced monster movie, a thing which recommends itself not by wonderful gothic atmosphere or a dreamlike mood, but rather its buffoonish bizarrerie, as well as its surprising number of bad hypnotized actor expressions, reaching from a bit sleepy to bug-eyed insane.

That is of course not a bad thing. I don’t think anyone who has any interest in classic low budget horror cinema from Mexico will rue watching this particular concoction. When you can’t gasp at the Baron’s toxically masculine bargain basement Lugosi shtick and every woman’s delight at being stared at creepily by this particular creep, you certainly will giggle and stare in disbelief at the monster costume, seen early, often, and repeatedly, looking like…something someone clearly has come up with for reasons inexplicable and potentially involving demonic possession, with its awkward tongue (that apparently function like a drill, though we neither see nor hear that) and its sweet tooth for brains.

Speaking of sweet tooth, the Baron tends to keep a luxurious looking bowl full of brains in his palatial living quarters at all times, typically in a chest or cupboard in a room he likes to invite the public into, so that every time he gets peckish and picks up his special long spoon to go for a bite without having to transform, he has to go through “suspense” contortions to get at the sweet, sweet brains. That this will be indeed be a plot point helping out our hero Miranda to understand that something's not right with the Baron goes without saying.

The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

Original title: La maldición de la Llorona

Somewhere in the Mexican countryside in the 19th Century, or thereabouts. The area is plagued by a series of horrible murders. Victims are found in terrible states – mutilated and without a drop of blood in their veins. The local police seems to have their suspicions about Selma Jaramillo (Rita Macedo), a widow apparently living completely alone in a huge, intensely creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere, being involved somehow, but thus far, there’s no actual evidence beyond the woman acting rather off-handedly, perhaps even a bit gleeful, about all the murders in her direct neighbourhood. We the audience know these suspicions about her are indeed well-founded, for the film’s first scene sees Selma – though with disturbing shark eyes in her face – her dogs and her scarred henchman Juan (Carlos López Moctezuma) making brutal work of some travellers.

Tonight is going to be special night in Selma’s house of horrors. After fifteen years during which she has kept the girl away, she has invited her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her in the house; she has a bit of a nasty surprise waiting as the young woman’s present for her 25th birthday. Amelia also brings a surprise of her own – she is freshly married to the cigar-chomping Jaime (Abel Salazar).

Amelia and Jaime quickly understand that something is very wrong with Selma and her house. A single servant the woman says she’s cut from the gallows and who certainly looks the part, mysterious cries in the house and an unpleasant vision in a mirror are the sort of things that’ll get guests into an ominous mood. And that’s before Selma reveals the horrible truth about their family to Amelia – they are the descendants of La Llorona (which in this version of the legend was an evil, powerful, bloodsucking witch), fated to become just like her. Amelia, says Selma, is cursed to bring La Llorona herself back to life by removing the pike she had been staked with when a bell that hasn’t tolled in ages will strike midnight. Worse still for the young woman, she too will become an evil, bloodsucking fiend, while Jaime, like apparently all men marrying into her bloodline, is doomed to madness.

While Amelia is more than just a little disturbed by all this, Selma is all too happy with her project. After all, following in her ancestor’s (or mother’s, the film isn’t terribly clear about it) footsteps has brought her considerable power and agelessness already; she expects nothing less than “omnipotence” once La Llorona lives again.

As most Mexican genre directors of his era, Rafael Baledón made a huge number of films in all kinds of genres, and as normal for everyone whose output is quite as humongous as his was – I speak from practical experience here – not every single film he worked on was a masterpiece; some were indeed rather bad. However, his best films – and I have by now seen more than a couple that deserve this description – could be outright brilliant.

La maldición certainly is brilliant, as great a Gothic horror film as anything the Italians or Corman made around this time, breathing the mood of bad dreams and cruel fates. Where most Mexican Gothic horror on screen seems to have come to the genre mostly by way of the Universal school (with more or less hefty pulpy elements added to the mix), this entry shows some clear influences by Bava, Black Sunday specifically. Particularly the beginning scenes, the shot of Selma, shark-eyed, surrounded by her attack dogs, and the whole look of the set dominated by broken trees they take place in suggest the iconic shot of Barbara Steele surrounded by her dogs, and the coach sequence at the beginning of Bava’s masterpiece. There are some plot parallels too, but Baledón’s film takes these elements in directions too much of its own for the film ever to become a rip-off.

Baledón’s direction may not be quite on the level of Bava at his best here, yet the film is still full of the mood of dreams and nightmare imagery, putting its characters into a place perpetually dominated by fog and nature that looks broken, twisted and corrupted, trapping them in a house whose series of secret passages and elegantly placed giant spider webs, its stairs leading who knows where suggest the subconscious mind much more than an actual house people would inhabit. The performances fit these places, particularly Macedo playing her Selma much larger than life. But then, how else would you portray the character of a potentially immortal, bloodsucking witch trying to push her niece into fulfilling the family curse?

Apart from the sometimes expressionist sets and camera work suggestive of the otherworldly and the strange, Baledón also has some simple, and brilliant ideas that make the film stranger in all the best ways. Take for example, the scene where Amelia – well on her way to turning evil herself – has a crisis of conscience, and the night sky above her suddenly fills with (animated) eyes; or the one where Selma exposits some of the family history to a hypnotized Jaime but all we see of the flashbacks (which look like scenes from other Mexican horror films as far as I could make out) is in negative form, turning what could be hokey cost-cutting peculiarly disquieting.


Thematically, this is a film very much about an obsession of Gothic literature and cinema (and sometimes weird fiction following it, too, see Lovecraft): the fear of inheritance as a form of fated doom, be it biological inheritance, spiritual inheritance, or a philosophical one, very close to the idea of free will being a mere illusion. Interestingly enough for a Mexican horror film - whose solutions to this sort of conundrum, this being a very Catholic country, usually involve religion or masked wrestlers – this particular horror here is averted by the very earthly love between a husband and a wife, the climax finding Jaime – not at all like a proper macho but rather like a real man – pulling Amelia back from the abyss by pleading with her and declaring his love. Well, he does get to punch Juan afterwards too, but that’s really more an epilogue to help the audience cope with Jaime’s general lack of fighting skill, as is the traditional – and impressive - breakdown of the house where everything took place.

La Cabeza Viviente (1963)

The Aztec warrior Acatl (Mauricio Garces) must have been quite a guy. Betrayed and killed by a treacherous priest, he gets one of the best burials ever - his head finds its final resting place on an especially nice tablet, the high priest Xiu (Guillermo Cramer) and the priestess of the moon goddess Xochiquetzal (Ana Luisa Peluffo) are buried alive with him to keep him company and an especially enthusiastic curse to keep away those pesky future tomb profaners is spoken, too. And that's still not all! Xochiquetzal gets to wear...THE RING OF DEATH, an eye-shaped, blinking monstrosity that will show exactly who has to be killed when tomb profanation time comes.

And, lo! 1963 a trio of archeologists under Professor Muller (German Robles) enters the tomb and takes everything with them that isn't nailed down, from Acatl's head to Xiu's mummy (which isn't visibly mummified at all, but has his obsidian dagger permanently fixed to its hand) to THE RING OF DEATH.

Nothing of the stuff lands in a museum, instead, Muller keeps it in his home and makes a gift to his daughter Marta (also Ana Luisa Peluffo) of the ring. Even ignoring how problematic this is from a legal perspective, there is also the problem of the curse to take care of. Not even Muller's inspired skepticism will help much when the first of his friends is sacrificed in a classic Aztec rite by the sprightly dead Xiu, with a hypnotized, sleepwalking Marta as a very active participant. Somebody has to carry Acatl's zombie head around on his plate, right?

Will the collective incompetence of Marta's fiancee Roberto (Mauricio Garces) and the police inspector Toledo (Abel Salazar) be enough to save Dr. Muller from his own daughter?

La Cabeza Viviente is a highly entertaining piece of Mexican horror. Its director Chano Urueta (known for more pieces of Mexican pulp cinema than one could mention, some catastrophically bad like The Brainiac, some rather splendid) doesn't delve as deep into Mexican gothic as many of my favorite Mexican horror directors do. Instead this is mostly a pleasant example of pulp storytelling with only the extremely incompetent heroes and the knack for the macabre pointing in a more gothic direction. But that's not much of a problem, since Urueta's direction here is more interested in cheap and friendly thrills than in mood and I'm certainly not one to complain about a film that succeeds at being simple, fast entertainment.

While some people (especially on the IMDB, the site full of people without a clue about cinema writing nonsense about it) might complain about a certain hokeyness of the chills and thrills the film offers, or about its lack of originality, I just can't see these things as much of a problem here. This is supposed to be a fast-paced, old-fashioned monster movie in the pulp spirit of the Hollywood serials, so subtlety doesn't need to apply.

Everybody involved obviously knows this. It shows in Urueta's simple, yet clever direction as well as in the pleasantly melodramatic acting. Especially Peluffo and (of course) Robles know exactly how thick to lay it on, and it truly is a pleasure to watch them really get into the whole silly business as if it were the highest drama. Taking silliness appropriately seriously is one of the great virtues an actor can have.

I wouldn't fulfill my duty as cult film blogger if wouldn't mention the best thing about the film: Garces performance as the disembodied head of Acatl, perfectly encapsulating how just plain wonderful it must be to have an afterlife much like the life of your typical cat. Being carried around on a plate by a pretty woman, taking many nice naps until the time comes to observe a sacrificial ceremony comes, then taking another nap, smiling wistfully, nodding bodilessly - that's what this head's life is all about. I, for one, can't help but wish for this sort of afterlife for myself.

La Cabeza Viviente truly is the best ad for a life as undead head on a plate I have ever seen, leaving the adventures of poor Nostradamus far behind.

 

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